Making It Big
by Eve Davidson
Summary: second person story of Craig after his Cd comes out. This is going to be Crash, major Crash.
1. Chapter 1

CD dropped today, and you cringe at the dorky picture from 11th grade on the cover, but Leo said it was cool so whatever. You try not to cringe at the fact that some of those songs about Ashley are songs she's never heard…until now. If she listens to it she'll know the truth. If.

You want a break, feel so tired from writing all those songs in rehab and polishing the rest, kicking coke and kicking Toronto. The last time you went back you realized you could never go back. What was there for you before is gone and maybe it's just as well, but it still hurts.

"Take a break, go on a vacation," Leo said and you listen to him, get out of Canada altogether for a break, head to the States. Hadn't even thought to ask him if the CD was stateside.

"Of course, kiddo," Leo says, sounding like your father for a minute, "that's where the big money is. That's where stardom is,"

Stardom. What the fuck? Is that what you even want? It's so hard to tell anymore. That doesn't even matter anymore. Making it big? Some dumb sixteen year old's dream that wasn't yours anymore.

It feels foreign to be in the United States even though it's the same language and in many ways the same culture. There's so many new singers and musicians and groups that no one notices you at all, and you like it that way. Staying in a city in Massachusetts called Worcester because Abby Hoffman was from that city. Drinking again but you are surprised that the drinking age is 21 here, and almost every place cards.

Driving around, the speed limit signs not making sense in miles, you find a back neighborhood bar and manage to order a drink, whiskey on the rocks. Maybe the thick beard stubble made the bartender think you were older.

Sipping the drink, talking to a girl at least two years older than you are, you think she looks a little bit like Ashley.

"Where are you from?" the girl says, drinking something that is bright green with a little red straw. The whiskey relaxes you, mixes with your meds, makes you dizzy.

"Toronto, but I live in Vancouver now," you tell her, and focus on her full red lips, glossy and red with make-up.

"Oh, that's the accent," she says and laughs, mimics how you say "out" and "about" and "sorry" and "tomorrow". Talking and drinking and you end up following this girl to a cheap hotel room, t.v. nailed to the wall, bedspreads that look 40 years old. Feeling nothing for her as you do things to her you wouldn't dare have done with Ashley or even Manny, feeling empty and not proud of yourself as you slink away in the weak morning sunlight.

You hear one of your songs on the radio and it makes you feel funny, because that is not what your voice sounds like to you and that isn't how the song sounded in your head when you recorded it. Disconnected. Only the words make any sort of sense at all, and that's because this is the Ashley song.


	2. Chapter 2

You have to leave the states, can't stay. Spending too much money, getting carded way too much despite the beard. Looking for your CD in the slots at the music stores. Stopping in Boston and New York before you go, the pace of those cities making your pulse quicken, and everyone looks so skinny and rich.

Stopping in a coffee house with the big couches and rickety spindly chairs, and you order the decadent Ethiopian coffee with the sugar encrusted around the wide rim and the whip cream and shaved bits of chocolate decorating the entire thing. Sipping it, such comfort food, the caffeine slowly buzzing and burning up through your veins.

You hear your Ashley song every day on the radio, and it doesn't even seem like something you ever wrote, were ever connected to in any way. All the gossamer threads have been cut.

Leo waited for you in Vancouver full of promotional ideas and CD signings and club tours and all the glorious rest of it, and more and more you find yourself thinking of Ashley, longing for her. But Ashley is out of reach, beyond the scope of your new life and you try to remember that. You begin to notice at clubs and CD signings that a lot of your fans are 13 year old girls, and you wonder if you can stand their passion. You can see in their eyes that they want that slick, clean shaven kid you were junior year, the picture on the CD case, not who you are now. Not some recovering drug addict, some bipolar freak, some burned beyond recognition high school drop-out with a college kid beard and long curly hair. What do they know? Some thread of personality remains the same, some secret of DNA and brain chemistry that doesn't change throughout the years. Can't that be good enough for them?

Pleasing them is beyond you, and the new songs you write all seem to focus on Ashley, and that may please them yet. The longing and love lost in those songs will pull them in, of course it will.

"Depressing shit," Leo said after hearing a few of them, rough still as you pluck out the guitar notes and try to match the words and the slipping melody, "but that's okay, people eat up that depressing shit,"

You nod at him, not having much use for him lately. He was all about this business you could care less about. He was all about pushing you to some next level that you couldn't even consider as anything real. The only thing that had been real, Ashley, was gone.

A few weeks off and you decide, on the spur of the moment, to go to Toronto and see if she's there, if she might at least talk to you. All the familiar landmarks coming into place, that other life of yours trying to reassert itself.

You don't know where else to start except the school so you go up to it, all the memories crashing back, flooding your senses. Being gone makes it so much more time warped, your past trapped in this bubble where it can't change or erode.

"Craig Manning?" You turn and see young girls, high school girls, but so young. Grade nines, obviously. You feel so much older than them, beyond their time.

"Yeah," you say cautiously, well aware that you don't know them, have never seen them.

"Oh my god," one whispers to the other and you watch them dig in their school bags and come up with your CD, your moody black leather jacket grade 11 picture trapped under their sticky fingers.

"Could you…could you sign this for us?" Three or four CD's shoved at you along with permanent black markers and you take them, sign your name. The girls thank you and look at you with love sick eyes, ask you questions just to keep you talking with them. So you talk with them for awhile, and it's nice to be in their attention, even though they are 13 or 14 at best. Children.

"Do you, do any of you know Ashley Kerwin?" you ask, and their looks darken a bit. You even know why. They want to pretend that you are in love with them. But they tell you that they have seen her, and where she is, and you wonder if you have the courage to find her.


	3. Chapter 3

You let them lead you to Ashley, although they could have told you where she was and you could have found her on your own. The school had that look in certain corners and in certain slants of the sun, it had that look like you'd never left it. It was more crowded than when you went here, for the most part. Although you did dimly recall that it was all crowded in grade nine for some reason or another, but grade nine was hazy.

"There," one of the grade nine girls says, pointing to Ashley in one of the media rooms. The grade nine girl bites her lip and looks at you with wide eyes. You blink, look down at her neatly parted hair, her skinny legs under a black skirt, the lust in her eyes. But to you she is a child.

"Thanks," you say, and she wanders off, walking slowly away. In the media room Ashley is fiddling with something, looking intently at the computer screen. Her hair is longer, it is the first thing you notice. Longer and curly and she is dressing different, slinky sexy shirts and jeans, high heeled boots. She doesn't look like a kid anymore and you think that is the difference. You glance back at the rows of lockers, the closed classroom doors with the little square windows set into them, this place where you were a child, or a teenager at least. 

She doesn't see you, doesn't notice you, and you think it's almost nice to watch her before she is aware. She looks involved in whatever she is doing, a look you remember from doing music with her in 11th grade. And you can't get over how much she looks like a woman. Where did the girl you remember go? You shake your head, clinging to the corner of the doorway, knowing that at any second she could look up and pierce you with those blue eyes. How you have longed to be pierced like that again.

Some noise in the hall behind you, a slamming locker or a dropped book, and Ashley looks up fast and sees you. The blue eyes widen in surprise.

"Craig?" Softly questioning, your name on her lips again.

"Ash," you say, unable to interpret her stare. She looks out of place in this place to you, stuck in your past. In her past. You've never understood her decision to come back to this school.

"Oh my God, Craig!" She stands up, comes over to you and hugs you, and you stagger back a little bit. Remember hugging her on other occasions and this brings it all flooding back. You put your arms around her and you can smell the shampoo in her hair, something like apples or flowers.

She stops hugging, stops crushing you in her embrace, and she stands back a little and looks at you. You can feel her taking it all in, the messy curly hair, the beard stubble, the choker necklace, the jean jacket. You duck your head under her scrutiny, press your lips together. You are aware that you have no good reason to be here, to be in the halls of Degrassi like walking around some life sized photograph. Only her. But things are slippery. Last time you really talked to her she was leaving in tears to go to London, tears that you had caused.

It's almost time for school to let out and you wonder for a second if she's trapped here like you used to be, controlled by the bells and told where to go. You remember for a split second how much you hated school, hated being controlled like that.

"Want to go get some coffee, I mean, if you can leave, or, uh, after school…" A simple thing like asking her to have some coffee with you had too many angles to seem to get out of your mouth, and you look at her hopelessly, not even sure if she wanted to go, if she wanted anything to do with you. But she smiled, her wide smile with her white even teeth, and she clicked off whatever thing she had been doing on the computer.

"Sure," she says, and explains that she could leave early, she was only taking half days most of the time because she had enough credits, she was just working on some stuff of her own. You nod, and she gets up and follows you down the hall and out into the sun and the cold.

At the coffee shop you order a white chocolate mocha and she gets hazel nut with cream. Her make-up is different, her clothes are different, but you wonder what it was you expected. Everything to be the same as it was when she left for London? You lick your lips and realize that that is what you thought. And you are having a hard time interpreting this small talk. Does she think you're just passing through and that you happened to run into her? She seems very casual, very nonchalant, cool toward you and about you in a way you could never seem to be about her.

Talking and laughing, sipping her coffee, she seems to be in an okay place despite still being in high school, of all places. She seems to be in a more okay place than you, drifting from city to city, performing your songs that you fear are resonating and making sense only to you, despite the screaming fans. Girls. But you couldn't know what they liked, the music or your troubled musician persona. Leo pushing you at every turn until you wanted to scream. Ashley flipped her hair over her shoulder, a gesture you'd never seen her make before. All these signs that you never really knew her at all.

She leans toward you, lowers her voice.

"How are things going, really?" she says, and you don't know how to answer her. So you talk about some little shows you did and some ideas Leo has and you get tangled up in your answer, lost. Her eyes never leaving yours, and if you could kiss her right now it might make you feel complete.

"Craig, I talked to Ellie…" she trails off and you narrow your eyes at her, and some anger sparks up again. This is exactly how she sounded after you were in the hospital. That half pity, half 'let me take care of you,' tone she could get. And Ellie, how you had fucked that up. So that's where she was with you, your coke addiction and betrayal of Ellie forefront in her mind.

"You've been clean?" she says, and you raise up your shoulders, try to sink inside of yourself. How could you think you could ever be on equal footing with her? Your problems are always stacked against you.

"Yeah," you say, and hear the embarrassment in your voice, and it reminds you of the time she asked you if you took your pills.

"That's good. I was worried," she reaches her hand across the table and covers yours. You look at her hand, the nails painted a dark red, the silver rings. Maybe you were too hasty, maybe she worries about you because she cares, maybe she even loves you a little bit still. You take a deep breath, relax a little, and smile at her. 


End file.
